Example of how Environmental Groups Have no Clue
Posted: Fri Mar 28, 2014 6:41 am
Yes this is long but it's educational and you can use it when you're deciding about going to beaches. I probably shouldn't say this but this particular topic is in my professional wheelhouse. Assessing the sanitary significance of bacterial indicators in water has been a major part of my job for over 30 years. So in this case you're getting what anybody would recognize as an "expert opinion."
I came across this article while doing Googling related to another thread and it inspired thoughts I think merit their own "political" discussion:
http://www.nola.com/environment/index.s ... along.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Also relevant is a slide show I linked in that other thread:
http://www.coastalconference.org/h20_20 ... Presen.pdf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
The bacterial indicator used for monitoring marine swimming waters is Enterococcus. Enterococci are not pathogens. They are normal intestinal flora. They are used to indicate the possible presence of pathogens under the rationale that, if intestinal flora are present, intestinal pathogens might also be present. However, human contamination is much more hazardous than animal contamination is. That's because, while there are some pathogens that can make people sick carried by animals, there are many MORE that are carried by humans. Viruses for instance. Most viruses are species specific. You are not going to get diseases like Norovirus and Hepatitis A from animals.
What the slide show demonstrates is that Enterococci are found in the intestines of humans as well as other warm blooded animals and is also produced by plants. What that means is that high levels of Enterococci do not necessarily mean water is "polluted" in the sense that most people would think of as polluted. That's because those high levels can be the result of being in an area, such as an area rich in wildlife, where there are a lot of animals and plants around. In many cases the situation is one in which Enterococci were deposited by animals at some point, persisted in the soils and such, then were washed off later by runoff or tidal action. Under such circumstances the risk associated with potential for pathogens that humans CAN get from animals is substantially reduced.
So back to the linked article. The Natural Resources Defense Council has no clue. Take beaches in Cameron Parish. It is obvious that almost all if not completely all of the Enterococci detected at Cameron Parish beaches originated from non human sources. Non human animals and plants. Cameron Parish is Louisiana's largest Parish by area, 1,932 square miles, and also its most lightly populated at 6,744. That's a whopping 3.5 people per square mile. Its largest town, Cameron, had 406 people as of 2000 and none of the beaches are immediately adjacent to it. None of the beaches are impacted by wastewater treatment plant discharges at all. BUT, they ARE within very rich wildlife habitat with a bunch of lush marsh vegetation around. There is even a large Federal Wildlife Refuge about 4 miles north of the coast where the beaches are.
If people think that swimming at a beach in Cameron Parish, Louisiana, carries a greater risk of illness than swimming somewhere like, say, Atlantic Beach New Jersey where there are 275,000 residents crammed into a small land area along with a bunch of tourists on top of that they are smoking crack. Well, probably not that. But they just don't understand the interpretation of bacterial indicators. You go swimming at a place like Atlantic Beach, New Jersey and you are swimming in waters impacted by millions of gallons of municipal wastewater treatment plant discharge each day. The bacterial indicators aren't in that effluent because the wastewater treatment plant disinfection systems kill them. But wastewater treatment plant disinfection is not as effective in inactivating viruses like Norovirus and Hepatitis A. What that means is that the bacterial indicator has been removed but the viral pathogens that the bacterial indicators are supposed to indicate the possible presence of are to some extent still there.
Plus when you have that many people you probably, on any given day, have some number of people crapping right into the water at the beach. They're getting into water deep enough to cover what they're doing, pulling their drawers down, and discharging because they really have to go and they're not going to try to make it to the nearest place where they can do it legally. Then they'll use their fingers to clean themselves because nobody will see.
And yes that does happen. People do that. And the bad thing is that if they get sick with something like Norovirus they are more likely to do it because when it hits you it hits you. You physically can't MAKE it to the nearest facility. You're going. Probably out of both ends too. And just the fact that there is a large number of people present makes the probability that something like that is happening at some point in the area at any given time relatively high. For example: The CDC estimates that there are about 20,000,000 Norovirus cases in the US per year. That's an average of about 55,000 per day. It's going on all the time.
The point is that just the mere presence of a dense human population is what makes it risky. Yes they have to close the beaches in a place out in the middle of nowhere like a Cameron Parish beach is when they get Enterococci results above the standards. But if you look at the area and see that there are very few people around that tells you it's not really dangerous as compared to beaches in highly populated areas. The better way to think of it is that, at any given single beach, higher Enterococci levels mean somewhat higher risk on average at THAT beach. Does NOT mean that beach is necessarily riskier than some other beach that is characterized by lower Enterococci levels overall.
Oh...if you're going to a freshwater beach such as in the Great Lakes the recommended indicator is E. coli. I know people are scared of that terminology but E. coli is also normal flora in the intestines of warm blooded animals. The overwhelming majority of it is completely harmless. Not pathogenic. It's just one type, Shiga toxigenic E. coli, that causes disease and I personally have never heard of anybody identifying that type in an environmental water sample. But all of the stuff I wrote above pretty much also applies to E. coli as a pollution indicator. Except I don't think it is generated by plants or at least if it is not the the extent that Enterococcus is. But anyway you can go way out into the middle of the wilderness where people would consider the vicinity as pristine and unspoiled and find plenty of E. coli in the water because it is in the feces of all warm blooded animals and it is a rich wildlife environment.
I came across this article while doing Googling related to another thread and it inspired thoughts I think merit their own "political" discussion:
http://www.nola.com/environment/index.s ... along.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Also relevant is a slide show I linked in that other thread:
http://www.coastalconference.org/h20_20 ... Presen.pdf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
The bacterial indicator used for monitoring marine swimming waters is Enterococcus. Enterococci are not pathogens. They are normal intestinal flora. They are used to indicate the possible presence of pathogens under the rationale that, if intestinal flora are present, intestinal pathogens might also be present. However, human contamination is much more hazardous than animal contamination is. That's because, while there are some pathogens that can make people sick carried by animals, there are many MORE that are carried by humans. Viruses for instance. Most viruses are species specific. You are not going to get diseases like Norovirus and Hepatitis A from animals.
What the slide show demonstrates is that Enterococci are found in the intestines of humans as well as other warm blooded animals and is also produced by plants. What that means is that high levels of Enterococci do not necessarily mean water is "polluted" in the sense that most people would think of as polluted. That's because those high levels can be the result of being in an area, such as an area rich in wildlife, where there are a lot of animals and plants around. In many cases the situation is one in which Enterococci were deposited by animals at some point, persisted in the soils and such, then were washed off later by runoff or tidal action. Under such circumstances the risk associated with potential for pathogens that humans CAN get from animals is substantially reduced.
So back to the linked article. The Natural Resources Defense Council has no clue. Take beaches in Cameron Parish. It is obvious that almost all if not completely all of the Enterococci detected at Cameron Parish beaches originated from non human sources. Non human animals and plants. Cameron Parish is Louisiana's largest Parish by area, 1,932 square miles, and also its most lightly populated at 6,744. That's a whopping 3.5 people per square mile. Its largest town, Cameron, had 406 people as of 2000 and none of the beaches are immediately adjacent to it. None of the beaches are impacted by wastewater treatment plant discharges at all. BUT, they ARE within very rich wildlife habitat with a bunch of lush marsh vegetation around. There is even a large Federal Wildlife Refuge about 4 miles north of the coast where the beaches are.
If people think that swimming at a beach in Cameron Parish, Louisiana, carries a greater risk of illness than swimming somewhere like, say, Atlantic Beach New Jersey where there are 275,000 residents crammed into a small land area along with a bunch of tourists on top of that they are smoking crack. Well, probably not that. But they just don't understand the interpretation of bacterial indicators. You go swimming at a place like Atlantic Beach, New Jersey and you are swimming in waters impacted by millions of gallons of municipal wastewater treatment plant discharge each day. The bacterial indicators aren't in that effluent because the wastewater treatment plant disinfection systems kill them. But wastewater treatment plant disinfection is not as effective in inactivating viruses like Norovirus and Hepatitis A. What that means is that the bacterial indicator has been removed but the viral pathogens that the bacterial indicators are supposed to indicate the possible presence of are to some extent still there.
Plus when you have that many people you probably, on any given day, have some number of people crapping right into the water at the beach. They're getting into water deep enough to cover what they're doing, pulling their drawers down, and discharging because they really have to go and they're not going to try to make it to the nearest place where they can do it legally. Then they'll use their fingers to clean themselves because nobody will see.
And yes that does happen. People do that. And the bad thing is that if they get sick with something like Norovirus they are more likely to do it because when it hits you it hits you. You physically can't MAKE it to the nearest facility. You're going. Probably out of both ends too. And just the fact that there is a large number of people present makes the probability that something like that is happening at some point in the area at any given time relatively high. For example: The CDC estimates that there are about 20,000,000 Norovirus cases in the US per year. That's an average of about 55,000 per day. It's going on all the time.
The point is that just the mere presence of a dense human population is what makes it risky. Yes they have to close the beaches in a place out in the middle of nowhere like a Cameron Parish beach is when they get Enterococci results above the standards. But if you look at the area and see that there are very few people around that tells you it's not really dangerous as compared to beaches in highly populated areas. The better way to think of it is that, at any given single beach, higher Enterococci levels mean somewhat higher risk on average at THAT beach. Does NOT mean that beach is necessarily riskier than some other beach that is characterized by lower Enterococci levels overall.
Oh...if you're going to a freshwater beach such as in the Great Lakes the recommended indicator is E. coli. I know people are scared of that terminology but E. coli is also normal flora in the intestines of warm blooded animals. The overwhelming majority of it is completely harmless. Not pathogenic. It's just one type, Shiga toxigenic E. coli, that causes disease and I personally have never heard of anybody identifying that type in an environmental water sample. But all of the stuff I wrote above pretty much also applies to E. coli as a pollution indicator. Except I don't think it is generated by plants or at least if it is not the the extent that Enterococcus is. But anyway you can go way out into the middle of the wilderness where people would consider the vicinity as pristine and unspoiled and find plenty of E. coli in the water because it is in the feces of all warm blooded animals and it is a rich wildlife environment.
